Reinforcement Learning — From Intuition to Algorithms
A narrative-first walkthrough of reinforcement learning, starting with everyday intuition and ending with the math behind Q-learning and DQN.
Archives
All the articles I've archived.
2025 12
November 5
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Tongue Twister Practice Sheet — Clarity and Fluency for Tech Talks
A structured articulation and pacing warm-up designed to help technologists speak with clarity and confidence in high-stakes meetings.
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The Custom Kernel Craze — Why Developers Are Taking the Wheel on GPU Optimization
Why modern AI teams are handcrafting GPU kernels—from FlashAttention to TPU Pallas code—and how smarter tooling is making silicon-level tuning accessible.
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vLLM and the Trilogy of Modern LLM Scaling
How PagedAttention, Continuous Batching, Speculative Decoding, and Quantization unlock lightning-fast, reliable large language model serving.
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When AI Sees and Speaks — The Rise of Vision-Language Models
UpdatedA high level view on how modern vision-language models connect pixels and prose, from CLIP and BLIP to Flamingo, MiniGPT-4, Kosmos, and Gemini.
February 1
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The Hidden Engine of AI — Training Frameworks and Resilience
A reader-friendly guide to scaling AI models beyond the data pipeline—from training loops and distributed frameworks to checkpoints, mixed precision, and fault tolerance.
January 6
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The 45-Minute Interview Flow: A Proven Framework for Cracking Google-Style Coding Interviews
A collaborative 45-minute thinking algorithm tuned for Google-style coding interviews—classify the problem, co-design an optimal approach, code with confidence, and handle follow-ups with ease.
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The Hidden Engine of AI — Datasets and Dataloaders
A deep dive into how datasets and dataloaders power modern AI—from the quiet pipeline that feeds models to the sophisticated tools that make training efficient. Understanding the hidden engine that keeps AI systems running.
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XGBoost — The Art of Boosting Trees with Second-Order Gradients
A deep dive into XGBoost — how second-order Taylor approximations and sophisticated regularization make it the dominant algorithm for structured data, bridging mathematical rigor with system engineering excellence.
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Diffusion — From Molecules to Machines
UpdatedA clear introduction to diffusion and guided diffusion — how a simple physical process became a foundation for modern generative AI, from Stable Diffusion to robotics and protein design.
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The Transformer — How Machines Pay Attention
An intuitive introduction to the Transformer architecture — from the attention mechanism to self-attention and cross-attention, using language translation as a concrete example.
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Variational Autoencoders — From Compression to Creation
An intuitive introduction to Variational Autoencoders — how compressing data into probabilistic codes enables machines to generate realistic images, sounds, and structures.
2024 1
December 1
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The Role of Predictions in Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving
Reflections on building production-grade behavior prediction systems at Zoox and Qualcomm — and why closed-loop reasoning is the bridge between perception and planning.
2019 1
January 1
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From Bits to Sight - A Journey from Wireless to Autonomous Vision
UpdatedMy research journey from wireless communication foundations to solving the camera calibration bottleneck that enables autonomous vehicle vision.
2017 1
November 1
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AutoCalib – Automatic Traffic Camera Calibration at Scale
UpdatedHow we used deep learning to automatically calibrate traffic cameras by observing vehicle motion—work that won Best Paper Award at ACM BuildSys 2017.